Thursday, 14 November 2013

Will everyone please shut up about Miley Cyrus?

According
to today’s Guardian, “it seems impossible that anyone with the
faintest interest in popular culture could have missed either the
song [Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines] or the controversy”. Well, I
guess today is the day that I found out I’d finally lost interest
in pop culture, because the only reason I was in any way aware of
this song (or Mr Thicke) was because of the utterly tiresome Miley
Cyrus twerking “controversy”.

Anyway,
apparently the song is very controversial, because some people think
it promotes rape. Only other people say it doesn’t promote rape,
and that the song only sounds as if it’s promoting rape if you
assume that the woman Thicke is singing about has not given her
consent. In the context of the song consent is apparently ambivalent.

The
reason I haven’t tried to get any clarification on the exact
details of this situation is that I don’t care. No-one has actually
been raped, the song isn’t explicitly about rape, and I can think
of at least half a dozen songs that I’ve heard which do explicitly
feature rape, and even condone it.

This
is just empty meaningless controversy, designed to stir up some shit
to sell some records. The media is more than happy to play along as
they can fill some column inches or a few minutes of airtime, stir up
some manufactured moral outrage, yell “Ban this sick filth!” and
get some attention of their own and increase their sales.

It’s
the same with Miley Cyrus. I’m of an age where I was, until very
recently, more aware of her dad than I was of Miley. Now, everywhere
I turn she’s shoving her bits in my face. I’m actually fed up
with it. I know you’re all grown up now, and having tits and being
able to show them off is a new thing for you, but seriously, they’ve
been around since the stone age and literally billions of people have
them. Get over it.

It’s
not “empowering”, it’s not “post-feminism”, it’s the same
old tired, cynical exploitation of a woman’s body in order to sell
shit. I really don’t think the fact that Miley Cyrus herself is
complicit and consenting in the exploitation changes much. She's not
the person being exploited (whatever Sinead O'Connor thinks), it's
everyone who pays any attention to it. It’s not that I find it
particularly offensive even, so much as it’s just tiresome. Are we
really, in this day and age, going to dance to this tune again? It’s
not like she’s even the first Disney star in the past decade to go
wild once she came of age.

Now
apparently Lily Allen’s new video has been accused of racism. Cue
more manufactured outrage. STOP IT!!!! Stop legitimising this
nonsense. The more people talk about these songs or videos the more
exposure they get, the more people listen to their music and watch
their videos and the more money the makers receive. It’s not rocket
science.

There
is a time and a place to make a stand. The BNP, the EDL, blackshirts,
homophobes; people who are making a serious intervention in British
public life. Not Miley Cyrus and Lily Allen.

These
people aren’t politicians. They aren’t trying to reshape the
society they’re in, through their art. They’re pop stars and
they’re trying to make money by selling sub-standard music to the
masses. When they cross a line the best course of action is to simply
personally boycott them. Don’t start a campaign to boycott them. Don’t write letters of complaint. Just don’t give them your
money. If we don’t allow a controversy to grow there’s no benefit
in shock tactics, and the lost sales will outweigh the sales gained
through free media attention.